Members from the Quebec Association of Victims of Priests use sign language on the steps of Église St. Viateur d’Outremont during a protest on Sunday March 10, 2013.

Quote:

On a chilly winter day in 2010, France Bédard led a picket demanding Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s resignation for not seriously addressing victims’ claims of abuse by Quebec clerics.

Today, she’d like to see him elected pope.

As founder of the Quebec Association of Victims of Priests, Bédard is to announce on Sunday the group’s support for Cardinal Ouellet becoming pontiff, during a protest against abuses by the Catholic Church held outside the Clercs de Saint-Viateur Outremont.

[...]

Over the years, Bédard said she sent repeated letters to Ouellet asking the Cardinal to act and remove priests proved to have committed acts of pedophilia and other kinds of sexual abuse.

“I have written to you on several occasions, without ever receiving a response,” Bédard wrote in 2008. “Your silence in this situation is inexplicable.”

With the Church losing influence in modern day Quebec, having a Quebec-born pontiff is the best hope for the alleged victims that Bédard’s association represents to obtain financial compensation from the Church.

“We realize now that is the only way these three cases will be swiftly addressed by Church authorities,” Tarini said. “What the victims need is not prayer but compensation.”

I don't want to see anyone as pope. But I'm curious as to why you say this, lagatta. Are you suggesting that someone else in that position might do less harm? My sources tell me that there is no John XXIII in the wings (and even if there were, poisons are even more sophisticated today than they were then...). My real concern would be if they bit the racist bullet and actually elected a cardinal from Africa or Latin America or Asia. They'd use that image to give themselves a lease on life.